1. Field of the Invention
This invention lies in the technical field of computational load distribution in networked computing environments. In particular, the invention lies in the field of green data centre technology, and energy-efficient data centre load distribution.
2. Description of the Related Art
Given their enormous electrical power consumption and associated carbon footprint, computing environments such as data centre's are natural targets for techniques aimed at improving their energy efficiency and reducing their impact on the environment. This is especially true in light of the explosive growth in the number of data centre's and the increasing dependence of our society on the information technology and computing services provided by them. Besides, energy costs are a major fraction of the operating costs of data centre's, becoming almost as important as the cost of the facilities and equipment.
Data centre's use some energy to power the IT equipment; computers, storage and networking equipment. The operation of this equipment produces heat (roughly equivalent to the amount of power provided to the IT equipment as there is no other way to dissipate the used energy) so another major use of data centre power is to remove this heat from the data centre equipment and halls and to expel it to the outside (by using, for example, air conditioners).
Existing data centre's are provided with global/centralized controllers which gather information from the devices in the data centre, and allocate and redistribute tasks among the individual devices in order to pursue a particular policy goal, such as energy efficient operation. Complex algorithms exist for calculating and realizing optimum distribution of computational load among devices and correct operating settings of cooling equipment.
As the size of data centre's grows, and their increasing importance in IT infrastructure provision increases, the complexity of the algorithms executed by the global/centralized controllers in order to meet energy efficiency targets also increases.